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For the first time in its 62-year history, the Cannes Film Festival will open with a cartoon. Not just any cartoon. A 3D cartoon that requires you to wear a heavy pair of space age glasses — goggles is probably more accurate — to see Disney-Pixar's latest animation in ravishing detail.

The immaculately painted story doesn't exactly leap off the screen, but the characters and objects in the foreground of the picture have the kind of physical presence that you get in an Aardman stop-motion animation.

Up is the uplifting comic tale of a grumpy 78-year-old balloon seller called Carl Fredricksen who is fed up with his dismal life. His beloved wife has died. Skyscrapers have sprouted up around his sleepy old house. And the local property shark is trying to dump him in a retirement home. Carl rips his house out of the ground by attaching several hundred thousand inflatable party balloons to his chimney and floats off to South America. It's an absolutely glorious spectacle. There's a sort of Heath Robinson lunacy about the way this curmudgeonly old stick uses curtains as sails, and a compass to guide him.

A sudden knock on the front door at 20,000 feet reveals a plump and terrified 8-year-old stowaway, Russell, who is hell-bent on getting his last boy scout badge for helping a pensioner. Carl (voiced by Edward Asner) spends the rest of the film telling Russell exactly how unthrilled he is at being forced to have him along for the ride. The story milks this vintage Disney theme of chalk and cheese strangers who learn the hard way how to value each other. But there's a bracing directness about how the film alludes to infertility, broken homes and ageing that feels very un-Disney and touchingly true to life.

Against the usual insane odds -- wild thunderstorms, and foggy near-misses -- the odd couple crash land next to an exotic waterfall in Venezuela that Carl fantasised about as an adventure-mad, short-sighted child. The delicious twist is that this wilderness is also home to a lost and legendary explorer, Charles Muntz (voiced beautifully by Christopher Plummer), arguably Disney's most accomplished psychopath. The leather helmets of adventurers who have come searching for Muntz and his iconic zeppelin are lined up on a cabinet next to polished skeletons of rare dinosaurs. Having spent a lifetime trying to capture a giant fabled bird that has taken an instant liking to Russell, the infuriated Muntz tries to murder the heroes and steal their new feathered friend.

It's here where Pete Docter's 3D picture comes into its surreal, and quite mad, own. Still tethered to their floating house, the two heroes are pursued by Muntz's army of rabid hounds who are armed with dog-collars that enable them to talk like East End goons. It's a terrific bit of cartoon invention, particularly as the wiring has come loose on the evil top dog's collar, making him squawk like a choir boy.

Up is a smorgasbord of these fabulous throwaway details. A light-fingered score that pays clever homage to old-fashioned adventures such as Around the World in 80 Days and Peter Pan, drops into a simple spare piano melody for those moments when the chiselled, arthritic features of Carl soften into remorse at his bolshy treatment of his young charge, or when the film leafs back through the bitter-sweet memories of his past.

It's an unusual, magical film with which to open an art-house festival. A nod perhaps to the 3D technology that is almost certainly going to become standard issue for all big box-office animations. A nod also to the fact that cinema -- especially in Cannes -- remains an awfully big adventure.

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